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Thanks for sharing your memories. I never had the privilege of having a BASIC compiler for DOS, my first one was Visual Basic 5. It was a marvel, producing real

Thanks for sharing your memories. I never had the privilege of having a BASIC compiler for DOS, my first one was Visual Basic 5. It was a marvel, producing really small exe files (one of my surviving samples is 15 kB). Granted, the executables were just P-code wrappers which needed VBRUN4.DLL to run, but it looked cleaner since the library was hidden in the system directory. DLL hell had some aesthetic advantages.

vunderba 7mo ago
Yeah, DLL hell... ugh. I have fond memories of Visual Basic. I still think it was one of the best tools for RAD (Rapid Application Development), you can definitely tell that .NET with WinForms borrowed heavily from it. At one point, I remember they started including MSVBVM_X.DLL runtimes in the Windows OS, allowing you to shrink application size for distro even further which was nice.